Psychological empowerment: antecedents, correlates and consequences

Abstract

This study examines, with an integrative perspective, the effects of employees’ perceptions about the empowering behavior of their immediate supervisor on employees’ psychological empowerment, and the effects of employees’ psychological empowerment on their job satisfaction, extrinsic reward satisfaction, affective commitment towards their organizations, turnover intentions; and task performance and organizational citizenship behavior. In addition, this study makes comparisons between the strength of some of the hypothesized relationships. The constructs of the study are examined with a preliminary qualitative study, which consists of 10 in-depth interviews, and the relationships among these constructs are investigated with a quantitative research that comprises a survey. Data are collected from 250 employees, and their (19) supervisors who work in 18 different firms from different industries operating in Istanbul, Turkey; and hypothesized relationships are analyzed with structural equation modeling procedure in AMOS18. The primary finding of the study is that there is a strong relationship between enhancing meaningfulness- providing autonomy dimension of empowering behavior of supervisors and employees’ psychological empowerment. Another important finding is that there are positive relationships between empowering behavior of supervisors and employees’ job satisfaction, extrinsic reward satisfaction, and affective commitment.